In 1981, Davis wrote a dissertation on the logic and history of significance tests. His principal advisor was Ian Hacking whose book Representing and Intervening (1983) had an enormous impact on Science Studies in that it drew attention to the instrumental and experimental interventions of scientists. He recommended that these interventions be considered independent of and not merely subservient to scientists' (theoretical) representations of the world. Small wonder perhaps, that Davis set out to explore this dimension of scientific practice. A 1987 article in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science marked the transition from his concern with the history of statistics to his interests in instruments: 'Factor Analysis, Instruments, and the Logic of Discovery' (vol. 38, pp. 319-337). Davis's 'Five Theses on Instrumental Realism' (in PSA 1988, Fine and Leplin eds., vol. 1, pp. 165-173) suggested that the philosophical dispute between so-called instrumentalists and scientific realists can be resolved in favor of realism as we focus on the ways in which scientific instruments (not theories) literally engage reality. He produced historical work on one prominent scientific instrument-maker, his father (cf., e.g., 'Analytical Chemistry and the "Big" Scientific Instrumentation Revolution' in Annals of Science, vol. 50:3, pp. 267- 290). At our meeting, however, he focused on his most recent and most radical work. He argues (or rather: shows) that there is meaning and knowledge in a material medium. A device like Faraday's first electric motor (Davis brought a version of it) represents communicable scientific knowledge -- however, communicable not in so many words, but communicable only in that we can pass the object around, tinker with it, modify and replicate it, and begin to fathom that the device itself is a peculiar kind of scientific achievement: it 'captures' a phenomenon without naming or explaining it, without accounting for it in a theoretical context. Indeed, the theories we begin to formulate about the phenomenon may be all wrong, but the knowledge involved in its material production persists. (For all this cf. the article in PSA 1994, Hull, Forbes, and Burian eds, vol. 2, pp. 441-451: 'Meaning in a Material Medium').
Alfred Nordmann
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